


The Prison of a Bird

by my_infinite_variety



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Heaven, Bees, Canon Universe, Dead Castiel (Supernatural), Dean Winchester Saves Castiel, Episode AU: s09e03 I'm No Angel, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Happy Ending, Heaven, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Memory Loss, Newly Human Castiel (Supernatural), POV Castiel (Supernatural), TheirLoveWasReal, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:21:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29404731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/my_infinite_variety/pseuds/my_infinite_variety
Summary: Castiel knows the truth, has known for a long time, and even the feeling of cold lips against his forehead doesn’t pull him from his spiral.He is forgetting.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18
Collections: Their Love Was Real: a Destiel & Saileen Fanworks Challenge





	The Prison of a Bird

It is Castiel’s opinion that the dead are unfailingly forgetful for beings with an infinite amount of time to remember. He’s studied the rise and fall of countless empires, presided over the deaths of kings and queens alike, and found comfort in millions of heavens in his time as an angel, and he recognizes the signs of forgetfulness, learned from those he held close from birth, to death, to erasure. 

The edges blur, faces lose their depth, and voices become monotone with time. The most far gone, the ones from the very beginning, are the hardest to watch. Castiel once sat with a woman from ancient Mesopotamia for some time, nearly immeasurable in heaven, and studied her lifeless face until it too began to blur, her very identity losing itself to the sands of time. The loneliest, most miserable often go first. The details lose their meaning, then the bigger picture, then anything from their time on earth at all until their heaven is a meaningless swirl of color.

Castiel sits at a tiny table tucked into the corner of a cramped kitchen, light streaming into the window and making him squint. There’s a box in front of him, just big enough to fit a small printer or perhaps two moderately sized toasters, but the corner of a bleached towel peeks over the side. Nestled in the middle of the makeshift nest lies an injured bird, its wing taped to its side and its ruffled yellow feathers showing starkly against the off-white towel. 

For a moment, Castiel considers breaking its neck and ending its suffering quickly, ending this _damned_ cycle, but it raises its tiny head and seems to peer up at him with one eye. Castiel shivers in his chair, hands curling into loose fists on the tabletop. It’s unsettling to be watched so intensely by something without a soul, a being that is little more than a husk of an animal, but the eye contact holds until he turns his attention to the window and the yard that lays beyond. 

There’s something wrong, something off about he’s seeing, and he squints and leans forward until his nose nearly touches the glass. The sun is still bright like it always is, and his eyes strain against the light but he doesn’t stop searching; the green grass, the tall trees, and the little patch of brown where his hives usually sit-

He blinks and three white boxes sit on that brown patch of grass like they’d always been there. He begins to wonder if he’s mistaken. _Maybe I just missed them the first time around,_ he muses absently, _or the light obscured my view._ But he knows the truth, has known for a long time, and even the feeling of cold lips against his forehead doesn’t pull him from his spiral.

Castiel is forgetting. 

In the beginning, Castiel had Dean in his bed and at his little rickety table for meals, kissing his cheek in the mornings before work and kissing him soundly on the mouth before bed. _Beginnings are often sweet and quiet_ , Castiel thinks much later when Dean is little more than a shadow in their home. He misses the peace when the quiet gets too loud and the burn of Dean’s eyes in his back makes him curl in on himself just a bit tighter. 

Dean was a firefighter in a small town just a few miles west then, always on call and never called in, and he smiled just a little too wide to have seen what Castiel knows he has. His eyes crinkled at the corners, just like they always had, but the crow's feet didn’t stick. His face was too smooth. His body was unmarred. His hands had calluses, but at the fingertips instead of the right thumb from his beloved ivory-handled colt. 

Their first night together, Castiel clutched onto him in their bed still panting and numb with pleasure, listened to Dean hum Kashmir with his head on his shoulder, and cursed himself for his weakness. The tattoo on the left side of Dean’s chest was missing, but Castiel still traced where it would have been with his fingertips. Dean flinched away from his feather-light touch, laughed sweetly into his bedmate’s sweaty hair, and Castiel closed his eyes against the rush of emotion.

Dean fell asleep in his arms, unaware, and Castiel laid awake staring into the dark of their cozy little bedroom, thinking of a conversation that seemed so very far away, in a time he had all but forgotten until just then. 

" _I’m not ticklish. Wasn’t as a kid either,”_ Dean’s voice whispered, and Castiel thought he could feel his breath brushing his cheek. _“Sammy would try and get me when we were kids, make it a game or somethin’, but it never worked out the way he wanted. I’d always get him back, make him laugh until he cried.”_ The voice paused. Huffed. “ _Maybe I’m broken.”_

He laughed bitterly in Castiel’s ear, or at least it seemed like he did, and the room went quiet once again. The Dean in his bed snored, the arm around his shoulders tightened, and Castiel closed his eyes against the burn of tears. 

He supposed that the thing that hurt the most was the way Dean’s shoulder was smooth under his hand, taunting him with tanned skin and a constellation of freckles that he never got the chance to learn in a past life. 

He fell asleep just as the sun began to rise and he woke with the memory of Dean’s story absent from his head like it had never been there to begin with. 

Much, much later but not quite as late as now, Castiel wondered if he had been forgetting since the beginning, losing the details that made Dean _Dean._ He wasn’t quite right, always quiet for just too long and always too readily eager to stay in Castiel’s bed late into the afternoon.

Castiel thought Dean wasn’t a morning person, pushed hard at his foggy memories to pull a morning spent in bed from his head, but there was nothing there. _If there ever was,_ Castiel thought then, pushing his face harder into Dean’s ribs, and the man himself heaved his body from the bed with a groan and a grin.

“Time to get up, darlin’,” he said, velvety smooth and wrong, and held out a hand. Castiel looked up at him from the mess of sheets for a long moment, blue eyes barely peeking over the white hem, and decided to take it. He was pulled to his feet and they stumbled into the hallway together, limbs tangled and Dean’s laugh ringing through their small home. 

“ _Angel_ ,” a familiar voice whispered in his ear. “ _Angel._ ”

But Dean stood at the kitchen sink, watering the plants in the windowsill above the basin, lips curled into an easy smile but not moving. Castiel blinked, focused on the rasp of air slowly filling his lungs, and blinked again to find the kitchen bathed in shadow. The stove light shone a faint glow across the tiled floor and, to Castiel, the shadows cast across the countertops almost seemed darker. 

The house was quiet, not even the sound of wood settling reaching Castiel’s ears, and he decided that Dean must have been out for the night. When he fell asleep curled up between sheets that smelled of smoke, worn leather, and _Dean_ , he drifted off quicker than he had in days; weeks, months, years?

Castiel decided it didn’t matter.

Dean came back different after that, in a way that he couldn’t even begin to put into words. 

Castiel thought he was quieter, more withdrawn, but the moment he dared to think so, Dean was lively and talkative again, hands rarely straying from Castiel’s skin. At night, when the perpetually full moon peeked into their window and Castiel was left to his thoughts, Dean would sleep peacefully and for almost exactly eight hours, like clockwork in his routine.

Castiel did not sleep most nights. He was caught between the past and the present, remembering smooth black leather seats while also knowing that their truck just outside had vinyl. Remembering the feeling of pressing a cassette tape into an often unreliable tape deck while also knowing that Dean hoarded records and CDs. Remembering a long-haired man with a kind smile that called Dean _brother_ while also knowing that Dean was an orphan and an only child. (Sometimes, when Castiel could feel himself suffocating in the darkness, there was a burn just under his ribs that made him wince. Now, he doesn’t quite remember the reason for the pain or even what it felt like.)

With Castiel’s head filled with noise and Dean’s entire presence empty of anything resembling life, they didn’t talk much. Well, they did, but their conversations were empty and repetitive, holding none of the fire Castiel yearned for in the sleep he caught on good nights.

“I love you,” Dean would say, whisper, laugh, moan into Castiel’s skin, and Castiel would smile at him indulgently, the weight of his love for Dean weighing him down.

“I love you, too, Dean,” Castiel would say back, his voice always soft and his hands always aching to reach out for the shell of the man he loved so deeply. 

It wasn’t enough.

The little yellow birds began to tumble from the pine just outside their front door some point after Castiel’s arrival. The details are fuzzy, the timeline is unclear, but Castiel remembers the first time he picked up the tiny yellow goldfinch from the grass and carried it inside. The calendar pinned to their fridge by a bulky Kansas-themed magnet said it was July when Castiel saved the bird for the first time. 

When the bird, cradled inside a towel-stuffed box, dies for what seems like the hundredth time, Castiel looks at the calendar on the fridge proclaiming JULY and wishes for an end to this endless summer. Dean stands over him, straightening from giving Castiel a gentle kiss on the forehead, and Castiel turns his attention to the man sharing his own personal hell.

He is a blur, a vague outline of a man. His skin is a blank canvas, freckles or scars nonexistent, and his face is blank, wiped of emotion or identifiable features. He looks like a mannequin, with limp plain clothes draped over his body. Even his eyes, something Castiel once held so close, are reduced to black pits. The thing that stands over him seems to attempt a smile, its blank face twisting unpleasantly.

“Are you hungry, dear?” He asks, his voice a mockery of warmth. Castiel wonders what Dean used to sound like when he was filled with life and righteous fire. _Nothing like this,_ he decides. 

“No,” Castiel whispers, turning his eyes away and focusing on the yard once again. The browning patch of grass outside sits vacant and he can’t remember if there’s something wrong with that picture.

There’s a noise, a whisper of air across the back of Castiel’s neck, and he sits up straighter. The presence hovering over him seems to dissipate and is replaced with eyes on the back of his neck. Castiel feels watched for the first time in a very long time. He feels seen. 

Castiel places his hands flat on the table, fingertips barely brushing the box sitting there, and he watches as a shadow falls over him. His nails, he notices, are neatly trimmed and his hands are without calluses. He doesn’t remember the last time he cut them or even if they keep a pair of nail clippers in the house. He wonders if it matters. 

“Cas,” a voice breathes, so very close to him. He curls his hands into fists, so slowly that his trimmed nails scrape against the table. There’s a lump in his throat and his face feels hot. The floor is swaying under his feet. He wonders if he’s disappearing. “ _Cas_.”

Castiel draws himself to his feet, turns himself to face his visitor, and he’s close enough to touch. Close enough to count his lashes and study the colors of his eyes. Close enough to see the details he had forgotten. Dean takes his hand. 

“Dean,” Cas whispers, and Dean finally takes him home. In this sandbox of Castiel's own mind, a goldfinch chirps. 

**Author's Note:**

> don't forget to leave a comment and/or kudos!  
> leave a request on my tumblr if you want to see more of me (myinfinitevariety.tumblr.com)


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